The murder of Glenn Miller...superspy! Did the legendary band leader really die in a plane crash? Not if you believe the latest Nazi conspiracy theory

THE GLENN MILLER CONSPIRACY: THE SHOCKING STORY OF HOW HE DIED AND WHY BY HUNTON
DOWNS (JR Books £18.99)

Glenn Miller: was his death an accident, or was he murdered by the Nazis?

As every rock star who has ever died a premature death
has now been disinterred by conspiracy theorists and found to have been
mysteriously bumped off, I suppose it's not surprising that attention should
have turned to the previous musical era.

The U.S. band leader Glenn
Miller was one of the biggest musical stars of the Thirties and Forties. Indeed,
he was so famous that when Miller travelled with the then U.S. President
Franklin Roosevelt in an open-topped car, a small boy is supposed to have asked
his friend: 'Who's that in the back with Glenn?' The official version of
Miller's death goes as follows: he disappeared over the English Channel in
December 1944 while en route to France in a small plane.

Although his
body has never been found, the theory has always been that his plane was hit by
a bomb jettisoned by an RAF Lancaster travelling back to England after an
aborted bombing raid. The Lancaster's navigator recalled seeing the bomb hit a
small plane - 'I remember seeing it spiralling out of control towards the
water.' This explanation, however, cuts no ice with Hunton Downs, who has spent
an unhealthy portion of his life - more than 50 years - trying to uncover 'the
real story'. Or, as he puts it in his own, very distinctive style: 'Glenn's
disappearance became for me one of the most daunting death mysteries ever to
involve a historical personage.'

The real story, according to Downs, is much
more bizarre, involving historical personages such as General Eisenhower, Adolf
Hitler, the actor David Niven and even Prince Charles. I can't imagine that
anyone could dispute its bizarreness. Whether there is the tiniest grain of
truth in it, though, is another matter.

It is always useful to have some
idea of a biographer's credentials, especially when he is putting forward as
outlandish a theory as this. Downs is a former U.S. Colonel who was once
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam
War.

According to one Dr James B. Conant, former U.S. Ambassador to West
Germany, whose rather lukewarm endorsement is prominently displayed in the
flyleaf, Downs 'has enterprise and a capacity to get things done'. Again, I
doubt if anyone could dispute Downs's enterprise, but it seems to go
hand-in-hand with a violently overheated imagination.

His account of what
happened has Miller's flight landing in occupied Paris and then carrying on to
Germany. There Miller, acting under instructions from Eisenhower, apparently
made contact with a group of dissident German generals including Erwin Rommel
and Gerd von Rundstedt. His mission was nothing less than to try to broker a
deal with the dissident generals, encouraging them to topple Hitler and thus
bring the war to an end.

And that's not all. Miller was also authorised
to offer sanctuary to a number of German rocket scientists including Wernher von
Braun, inventor of the V2 rocket, who later became the father of the U.S. space
programme. At this point, the curious reader may scratch his or her head and
ask: 'But why on earth would Eisenhower pick one of the most readily
recognisable men in the world to undertake such a top secret mission?' According
to Downs, the answer lies in Miller's German ancestry. Miller, he claims, spoke
fluent German and had come to England to make a series of radio programmes to be
transmitted to Germany. In these broadcasts, Miller, as well as playing some of
his popular numbers, called upon the Germans to lay down their weapons and
surrender.

Captain Glenn Miller in uniform

If the broadcasts took place at all - there is a good deal of
dispute about this - they could hardly be counted an overwhelming success given
the Germans' stubborn refusal to run up the white flag. However, Eisenhower, it
seems, was hugely impressed by Miller's efforts. So, too, was 'Glenn's boss in
the espionage game', David Niven.

Some of the information that Downs has
uncovered does have a mysterious whiff about it. For some reason, Miller's
disappearance was not announced until a week after his plane went
down.

What's more, the airfield he reportedly took off from on the day
the crash is supposed to have happened - RAF Twinwood in Bedfordshire - turns
out to have been closed because of bad weather.

As for the story about
Miller's plane being hit by a bomb, there was no bombing raid on Germany that
day. And while the navigator of the Lancaster may have recalled seeing a bomb
hitting a light aircraft, the pilot maintained that no jettisoning of bombs had
taken place around this time.

But for every faintly plausible nugget,
there is a vast wobbly pile of supposition. At the same time, Downs exhibits
unmistakable signs of paranoia. He claims to have been the recipient of at least
one death threat - from people or organisations who will stop at nothing to stop
the truth from coming out.

Apart from the fact that anyone concerned in
the 'cover-up' would surely be too old by now to mount anything other than the
most ineffectual death threat, it's unclear why anyone should be that bothered
about 'the truth' emerging. So what if Miller did try to broker a peace deal
with the Germans? It hardly scuppers the Allied war effort.

Downs doesn't
help his own case with his habit of ending his sentences with the words: 'As we
shall see...' But we don't see, that's the trouble. We don't see at all. To make
matters even worse, he's apt to hare off on any tangent that presents
itself.

One of the many oddities about this book is that there isn't
actually that much about Glenn Miller in it. Much of it consists of stuff about
the war that bears no relevance whatsoever to Miller's secret
mission.

Yet nothing, of course, can dampen the zeal of the impassioned
conspiracy theorist. In the Eighties, Downs hears about a man who has been
'hiding Glenn Miller's part in the "secret" war'.

This unidentified man
was 'a national name, aligned to the defence industry, and he was in
Cheltenham'. In order to try to get close to him, Downs moves to nearby Tetbury,
'where I had good neighbours, Prince Charles and Diana in their Highgrove
estate'.

It's not entirely clear what Downs means by 'good neighbours'
here. Were Charles and Diana just considerate in not playing their drum 'n' bass
records too loudly after 10.30pm, or did they offer him more concrete help?
Convinced that his post was being intercepted, Downs decided to pay Charles a
visit. But Charles, he writes, had 'gone off to work in his tactful way' - or
legged it through the back door as soon as he saw him coming, I suspect. As for
the 'national name' in Cheltenham, he, too, proves elusive.

What, then,
did happen to Glenn Miller if he didn't plunge into the English Channel? Downs's
version has him dying in a Paris brothel shortly afterwards, killed by German
agents who owned the place. There's no suggestion that Miller was visiting the
brothel in a professional capacity - he seems to have been as upright in his
private life as he was fearless as a secret agent. Rather, he was smuggled there - probably unconscious, Downs thinks - from Germany after his mission was
rumbled.

But even by Downs's standards, the evidence is extremely scanty.
As far as I can tell - and it's not always easy to work things out from his
tortuous exposition - only one man, a British soldier, again unidentified,
claims to have seen Miller's body being carried out of the brothel on a
stretcher: 'We watched as the body was loaded into a GI ambulance. The dead man,
an army officer said, was none other than Maj. Glenn Miller.'

And there you have
it: what Downs insists on calling 'the final chink of proof'. Possibly there
will be those who are convinced by his arguments, who will reach the end of this
book and exclaim: 'That explains everything!'

Such people are advised to lie
down in a darkened room, press a damp flannel to their brows and seek urgent
medical attention.

Share or comment on this article:

The murder of Glenn Miller...superspy! Did the legendary band leader really die in a plane crash? Not if you believe the latest Nazi conspiracy theory: THE GLENN MILLER CONSPIRACY: THE SHOCKING STORY OF HOW HE DIED AND WHY BY HUNTON DOWNS